DX10 seems to affect the particles the most. Looking that the screens it looked like the mist/smoke in dx9 was sort of thicker "cough cough, I have asthma", and on dx10 it looked a little more whipsy. Kind of an, "excuse me, what's all this mist doing here". Totally...
A geforce 6150 will run games like Doom 3 and Half-life 2 pretty well. I play Doom 3 on a 5200, which is by no means a recommendation. You'll probably get some low or medium quality Quake 4 action out of it too. So... games that came out 1 or 2 years ago and anything before that.
KiwiEmperor's comments